Horror Lurks

Spades

♠A: The late king’s handsome food-taster, investigating the unusual assassination of the king of which he is the prime suspect.
♠2: An aging queen, who steals the occasional heartbeat from her unsuspecting citizens, and is using them to fill a massive hourglass that will help her stave off the ravages of time.
♠3: A simple craftsman, who served his necromancer-prince well in times of war, is begging his lord to restore his young daughter to life.
♠4: The vampire’s seneschal, who has discovered that his master’s flock of vampire bats has fallen under the control of some outside force.
♠5: The gallant explorer and witch hunter who travelled into the foreboding swamp and re-emerged possessed by some dark entity.
♠6: The young child who, inexplicably, has the entire court terrified and vacillating before him while the king and queen are away on the front lines of a battlefield.
♠7: A swashbuckler whose luck has never failed her, even saving her from certain death on numerous occasions.
♠8: A promising witch subject to the curse of another – that every curse she lays, she shall suffer herself as well.
♠9: A cowardly legion of goblins so famed for their blood thirst that none have ever faced them in battle.
♠10: A tinker, enslaved by a cruel necromancer and forced to improve upon the undead with mechanical designs.
♠J: A diminutive man whose very presence strikes fear into the hearts of all, even fiends.
♠Q: The fanatical assassin-smith who must consecrate his new weapon in the blood of a noble.
♠K: A sword that has grown tired of killing.

Hearts

♥A: A man, once mighty, driven mad by mirages and dehydration.
♥2: A cauldron that yields the sweetest of brews, but is filled with corpses and blood, and the decadent nobles addicted to the substance.
♥3: A palace for a demon built deep in the city’s sewers so the screams of his victims issue from every manhole.
♥4: A circus for the depraved where all the acts involve slaughter and mayhem.
♥5: A butcher who only serves the meat of creatures that do not exist.
♥6: A malicious magician and flesh-warper who enjoys torturing those he modifies.
♥7: The vile and mobile shadow of a terrifying demon, now miles away from its progenitor.
♥8: A sky serpent as fearsome and fast as a sea serpent but capable of snatching its prey from any street or home.
♥9: A giant spider, carefully and lovingly painted, and its elven master.
♥10: Strange skull-headed beasts following the moon across the land.
♥J: A palace built on an ancient but not yet quiet battlefield.
♥Q: The swarm of giant rats plaguing the city and devouring livestock.
♥K: An ogre modified and transformed by a tinker until it is a crude but savage puppet.

Clubs

♣A: The blood rain that has fallen unrelentingly for days, and the injured who find that in this weather their wounds will not heal.
♣2: Since an attempt on his life, the mayor turns two blind eyes towards smuggling.
♣3: A furious mermaid, drifted far inland by unusual tides.
♣4: A great and hideous sea beast, washed ashore and vulnerable but with a tempting offer.
♣5: The witch, come to claim the heir to the throne as she was promised years ago.
♣6: An anchorite, entombed centuries past and only now moved by a spectral force.
♣7: A cloak of invisibility, fallen into the wrong hands.
♣8: A misshapen slave, ugly but in love with its master’s newest prisoner.
♣9: The giant and hostile fish that plagues shipping vessels and has just sunk the city’s last grain barge.
♣10: A street urchin’s stray encounter with a devil walking through the world of men.
♣J: A selkie, whose pelt was snatched to make a noblewoman’s coat.
♣Q: A young maiden, turned to stone by merciful gods, as she waits for the return of her long-lost fiancé.
♣K: A hermit, who lived on an iceberg for a decade but is now washed ashore in a distant port.

Diamonds

♦A: An unprincipled hunter, learning her trade from observing the predator-reptiles, and the prey that she is compelled to rescue.
♦2: The urban elves forced by their human duke to wage war against their barbaric and murderous kin.
♦3: A horse thief who has become doubly apt at his trade after learning a simple spell that places an animal’s mind under one’s control.
♦4: he forest fires sweeping the land and the mysterious imp lighting them.
♦5: Goblins, receiving a taste of civilisation through their decades of slavery to a greater power, have liberated themselves and are taking advantage of the knowledge and skills beaten into them.
♦6: The orcs, after centuries of fighting with the cast-off or stolen weapons of their enemies, have begun to forge their own – and the results are sharper than dwarvencraft.
♦7: A shaman has learned how to warp and distort his own bones to create cutting barbs and protective armour.
♦8: The shamans of a distant mountain tribe, called up because of an ancient pact with the empire, ordered to restore rain to its parched fields.
♦9: A tribe of desert lizardfolk, incensed at the recent slaying of a mighty dragon.
♦10: Tribes of hunter-gatherers have caught a small town in the middle of their undying feud.
♦J: A village that lies directly in the path of a mammoth stampede.
♦Q: A man who earned the undying love of a feathered fey and is now followed by hundreds of birds so the besotted fey can observe him always.
♦K: The strange and monstrous plants of a secret vale and the hapless mortal assigned to tend them.